Meet the One Who Graduated High Skool

I once took a job with a company that had some interesting HR practices. One of these was a requirement that every new hire’s possession of a high school diploma be verified. Every new hire had to go through this, even the ones who have been out of high school for a very long time.

This was a huge pain, because when you call a high school and say, “I need to verify that Joe Blow graduated in 1970,” they tend not to be overly eager to call you back. This is especially true in the summer, when there’s no one there to take the call. Also, some schools have merged or closed, and not everyone went to high school in the United States. In fact, we had one guy whose school was in Mexico, and had since burned down. He brought a document attesting to this. It was in Spanish. I got to use the little bit of Spanish I learned during my childhood in San Diego. I felt very useful.

Anyway, one of the ways that the company got around the hassle of calling these schools was to ask candidates for a copy of their diplomas.

So this one guy brought a diploma that was printed on an inkjet printer. It was a little crooked. It said he had graduated from “North High Skool.”

Tip: If you’re forging a high school diploma, spell check is your friend.

Tales of the Cluefree appear pretty much every Friday. Past stories are here.

6 Responses

I was just wondering about this! (and had even planned to blog about it). I just applied for a very low-skill job (clerk at a garden store) and they wanted to if I had graduated from high school and if so, when and where. Then they wanted to know about college and grad school.

If you’ve graduated from college, does it matter if you’ve graduated from high school?

And even if you haven’t graduated from high school, so what? If you are a 45-year-old woman who has someone managed to survive to this point, perhaps you are capable of working a cash register, even without having high school chemistry and physics. Perhaps someone’s references is a more accurate predictor of success than a HS diploma.

Class Factotum, it’s interesting that they’re asking you *when* you graduated from high school. Most employers don’t, because it tells them how old you are. It’s not technically illegal to ask how old someone is, but virtually no one does, because doing so makes it look like you might discriminate on the basis of age.

I’m guessing they have a very old application form.

I personally wouldn’t consider high school graduation to be a big deal at all once someone has an established work history. I know I’m in the minority among my HR peers though. That said, the employer I blogged about in this post is the only one I’ve ever worked for who verified high school graduation for every single applicant (and it turned out they did so because of a misunderstanding of a federal regulation; we did away with that requirement once we cleared up the misunderstanding).

Hmm. It’s been ten days since I turned in the application. Perhaps they didn’t ask for a date. My mind is like a sieve. Now that’s a reason not to hire me — I cannot remember simple details. How could I be expected to remember where the peat moss is?